Tag Archive: good writing

Karen Joy Fowler’s ‘We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves’

By Ron Charles

You know Karen Joy Fowler, though probably only for her least representative novel — that charming bestseller “The Jane Austen Book Club.” It landed with perfectly calibrated Janite wit in 2004 during a wave of renewed enthusiasm for Austen and book clubs. But aside from that domesticated crowd-pleaser, Fowler is also the author of genre-blending works of historical fiction and fantasy. Her stories have won the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Awardand the World Fantasy Award. In 1991, she co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, a prize “for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.”

One never knows what to expect from her.

Her new novel, for instance, involves an ordinary Midwestern family: two parents and three children.

The younger daughter is a chimpanzee.

And why not? If Gregor Samsa can turn into a cockroach and Edward Albee can ask, “Who is Sylvia?”, a chimp for a sibling doesn’t seem so far down the evolutionary tree. In fact, just as most of us have decided that we should probably stop torturing chimps to death in the name of science, an outrageous community of simian novels has been congregating in the branches of the library, from the “autobiography” of Tarzan’s sidekick, “Me Cheeta,” by James Lever, to “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore,” by Benjamin Hale.

But there’s nothing fantastical about Fowler’s new novel with its drawing-room title, “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.” In fact, the plot is inspired by several real experiments, including the work of Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, scientists at Indiana University who raised their baby son alongside a chimp for almost a year in the early 1930s.

Fowler places her story in the 1970s and extends the experiment to five years. Dr. and Mrs. Cooke live in a farmhouse with a gaggle of graduate students in Bloomington, Ind. They have a son named Lowell and two new daughters, Rosemary and Fern. Rosemary never stops talking; Fern never starts. But their parents have “promised to love them both exactly the same.” So far, so normal.

In a witty, conversational voice, Rosemary reluctantly parcels out the details of her “chimped-up household.” She doesn’t mention her sister’s body hair issue until page 77. “I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact,” she says. “It’s never going to be the first thing I share. . . . In my defense, I had my reasons,” she adds. “I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.” She’s right, of course. Fern’s identity is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The mechanics of this weird family arrangement are irresistible: How did the Cookes care for these two toddlers, feed them, dress them, keep them from hurting each other? “What was the goal of the Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end?”

As an adult looking back on her famous childhood, Rosemary is curious about those questions, too. But the answers are elusive because once Fern left the family, no one mentioned her again, and it’s not at all clear what precipitated her departure. All Rosemary can do now — many years later — is try to excavate memories of their time together and catch lingering impressions of her sister still persisting in her own personality.

All this sounds like rich material for a novel, but there’s more. “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” isn’t just about an unusual childhood experiment; it’s about a lifetime spent in the shadow of grief. Clearly, something traumatic happened when Rosemary was 5, something that turned her from a loquacious little girl into a quiet young woman. But unearthing the details of that event means digging in a mental landscape strewn with psychological land mines. Others can’t or won’t tell her the truth. Her own memories are confused and clouded. She’s grown wise and skeptical about the slippery nature of family history. “Language does this to our memories,” she says, “simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.”

Although the story moves erratically over almost 40 years, it focuses on a few chaotic days in 1996 when Rosemary was a fifth-year student at the University of California at Davis. An unlikely friendship with an unstable fellow student triggers a series of confusing feelings. “This, finally, was the moment the hypnotist snapped her fingers,” Rose says ruefully. Curious but wary, and with a wry reference to the damage done by Sigmund Freud, she begins reconstructing what happened to her and her family, handling old memories worn “thin as Roman coins.” Refreshingly, she has the humility to admit that she can’t tell whether she’s making some of this up: “I was completely buried in the unremembered, much disputed, fantasyland of the past.”

Plot is not the novel’s strongest suit. The wackiness that stumbles into the final chapters feels incongruous with the book’s poignancy and its serious themes. But Rosemary’s voice and her efforts to understand — and forgive — herself are moving. Fowler has such a sprightly tone, an endearing way of sloughing off profound observations that will illuminate your own past even if you have no chimps swinging in your immediate family tree.

It’s also impressive how gracefully Fowler resists the impulse that could have turned her novel into a shrill PETA poster. Toward the end, she offers a stomach-churning summary of animal research done during the 20th century, but that’s more a lament than an argument, an acknowledgment that “the world runs on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery.” What does it mean to be human, she asks, and what does it mean to be humane? Although there’s little doubt where her sympathies lie, Fowler manages to subsume any polemical motive within an unsettling, emotionally complex story that plumbs the mystery of our strange relationship with the animal kingdom — relatives included.

Charles is the fiction editor of The Washington Post.

Karen Joy Fowler will be joining us at Lismore Castle, December 9 – 16, 2013. Karen will be teaching a five day Fantasy Writing Workshop, limited space.

In late June, we’ll be going to Bali. We’ll be staying at, La Villa Mathis a four-star villa in the village of Umalas, a suburb of Seminyak. We’ll be holding our conference in a quiet location that’s surrounded by rice fields, minutes away from the beach.

Dan Chaon and Alex Shoumatoff will be teaching writing workshops.

DAN CHAON is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

ALEX SHOUMATOFF is a contributing editor with Vanity Fair.

Alex was born in Mt. Kisco, New York. After graduating from Harvard College in l968, he worked on the Washington Post, as a singer-songwriter, and as the resident naturalist at a wildlife sanctuary in Westchester County. His first book, Florida Ramble, was published in l974 (Harper and Row, Vintage paperback). In the fall of l976 he spent nine months in the Amazon researching a Sierra Club book, The Rivers Amazon (Sierra Club l978, hard and soft), which has been compared to the classics of Roosevelt and Bates. His next book, Westchester : Portrait of a County (Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1979, Vintage paperback), was excerpted in the New Yorker, for whom Shoumatoff became a staff writer in l979. There, under Robert Bingham, the editor of John McPhee and Peter Mathiessen, and later under John Bennet, he wrote long fact pieces that were then developed as books: The Capital of Hope (Coward McCann, and Geoghegan, 1980, Vintage paperback, about the building of Brasilia), Russian Blood (Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, l982, Vintage paperback, a chronicle of his own family from the dawn of Russian history through the October Revolution and emigration to the United States ), The Mountain of Names (Simon and Schuster, l984, Touchstone, Vintage, and Kodansha paperbacks, a profile of the Mormons’ Genealogical Society of Utah that became a history of the human family), In Southern Light (Simon and Schuster, l986, Touchstone and Vintage paperbacks, about a two-month journey in Zaire and a trip up the remote Amazonian tributary where the Amazon women are supposed to have lived). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in l985.

In l986 Shoumatoff wrote a profile of Dian Fossey for the newly resurrected Vanity Fair that was made into the movie, Gorillas in the Mist and was collected in African Madness (Knopf l988, Vintage paperback, also containing pieces on Emperor Bokassa, the natural history of Madagascar, and AIDS in Africa). He covered ousted dictators for Vanity Fair (Stroessner, Mengistu, Mobutu) and wrote a seminal piece on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. His l989 piece about Chico Mendes, the murdered leader of the Amazon’s rubber tappers, was optioned by Robert Redford and expanded into The World is Burning (Little Brown, l990, Avon paperback, published in ten languages). In l995 he became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. Recent pieces include Uma Thurman, the Panchen Lama, the Weld-Kerry Senate race, the Great Camps of the Adirondacks, a profile of Bedford, New York, the race to find the winter grounds of the monarch butterfly. His latest book, Legends of the American Desert, (Knopf, l997, a 500-page portrait of the American Southwest), was glowingly front-paged by the New York Times Book Review and was both Time Magazine’s and the New York Post’s second-best non-fiction book of the year.

Price Includes:

2 writing workshops, one from Dan Chaon and Alex Shoumatoff 5 days/3 hours. Two, 15 minute personal one on one with each instructor. Evening lectures, music and dance performances.

$3,900 for a single room w/breakfast and dinner. Air Fare not include.

Two participants from our recent conference at Hever Castle, have submitted their work for publication to Alex Shoumatoff’s site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com. In addition, he is also working with the Moore Family on their multigenerational family saga, the subsistence farmer grandpa, Woody the mechanic and preacher, and James the writer. These stories will be written in sections by Woody and James– a first in the genre, which takes writing back to the collective self-expression it began as, and away from the myth of originality and the ego trip that writers today can fall prey to.

Alex says, “I think you’re doing something really great, when you think of all the different sensibilities, some sophisticated, some not, that you brought together and how we all bonded with our common love of the written word.”

The elegies and laments in this chapbook explore in musical and unsparing language the deaths of four people who touched Laura Louis’s life deeply. In the title poem, “Some, like elephants,” mourning takes many forms—“Some slash the sky…some walk from town to town…some rage at the moon.” Like the elephants, Louis chooses to circle the specter of death in an unflinching attempt to glean meaning. The elegies offer remembrance and praise but also bring both Louis and the reader closer to an acceptance of what is inevitable and ultimately unknowable.

In the first poem, “An Attempt,” death almost becomes a lover in the opening stanza.

I’d not lived till I’d felt the singe

of Death’s hot breath as He rushed past

Were His touch not so chill a hover

I’d have sworn He was my lover (p.3)

“An Attempt”begins as a formal sonnet then breaks down into forms defined by Louis’s own experience of death and language.

But elegy and lament

—these jet jewels—

have no set arrangement.

For honoring the dead there are no rules (p. 3)

The image of elegy as a “jet jewel” conflates death with something both precious and outlasting human life expectancy. Jewels are made of minerals mined from the earth. They are cut and polished for clarity and brilliance just like the words in Louis’s poems. The image also alludes to the book’s many references to stones beginning with the book’s cover photograph, taken by Louis, where stones resemble speckled eggs. These allusions continue until the final poem, “The hour of the stone.” These stones are in contrast to the motif of wings that first appears in the poem, “Alight.”

Below the hawk

one other sent,

low and sleek,

wings folded arrow, (9)

At the end of “An Attempt,” Louis questions her right to “write of the day/they died, or the way.” She justifies herself by asking another question that can only be answered by her own refusal to believe there is no meaning in death. “If their loss did not intelligence give/why then did we send them forth?”

The longest poem, “A Burden of Wings, Agnes 1984-2005” elegizes a young woman who committed suicide. Told in four sections, the first three parts are the narrative of Louis’s brief and keenly felt encounter with an old boyfriend’s daughter and her reaction to the daughter’s suicide at age twenty-one. This is Louis’s most intensely felt and personal elegy. At their first meeting Louis says,

She came skittering across the road like a waterbird

some massive-winged creature on impossible legs

What use, legs? She was built for soaring (p. 15)

Here, Louis refers to the nature of Agnes’s undisclosed mental illness. Louis’s identification with the young woman is passionately felt. After all, Agnes could have been her daughter.

We fell on one another like long lost kin

Her harp/my piano, my cloth/her clay (p. 15)

Look, we wore the same size glove

Both made things with our hands, for love

Found self in silence, and solace at the fount (p. 16)

The poem shifts to the day of Agnes’s funeral where Louis thinks of Agnes’s illness as “no more visible than the blood in a ballerina’s slipper” and then to Louis’s meditations on Agnes and the day of the suicide. The incantatory final fourth section breaks away from the narrative and takes flight. Japanese tradition holds that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted the wish of health and a long life. The section begins with “Thousand Cranes, the shop was called,” a place where Louis and Agnes shopped. Louis touches on myth, the solace of repetitive work, and the missed opportunity to impart her own wisdom that might have saved Agnes.

Fold, bend

colored squares

six by six by six by six

A thousand folds, a thousand bends

A thousand more, a thousand cranes (p.19)

In the second part of the quartet, a coffin contains Agnes’s body six feet under. The “waterbird” of the first part of the quartet reappears as a paper crane. Louis attempts to contain Agnes’s death between the folds of origami wings. She also gives Agnes the graceful flight of cranes. A thousand folds, bends, and cranes serve to push the boundaries of Agnes’s death outward, not just in flight, but to encompass thousands of deaths. The poem ends with Louis’s regret that “I know how to fold the crane. I/ could easily have taught her.”

Louis’s poems contain tenderness, honesty, and a gentle humor. In the final poem she ruminates about times she escaped her own death.

Sixteen,

nearly stepped into the path

of a MACK, walking

while reading Abe Kobo

Ah—to be undone by truth

and beauty (Really,

not a bad way to go) (p.28)

In the last stanza of the book Louis says, “…let me not die from a lack/of heart, or of a failure to communicate.” By writing this book Louis assures that this particular death will not come to pass.

Hua Jiao (花椒). Szechwan pepper, literally flower pepper. The outer pod of the tiny fruit widely grown and consumed in Asia as a spice; produces on the tongue a tingling, buzzing, numbing sensation like the effect of carbonated drinks or a mild electrical current; numbs the tongue in preparation for hot spice.

His name was Mao. “Like the dictator?” I asked when my Chinese mother first told me about the young man, before I met him and the black hair fell across his eyes, curtaining their coldness. I remember how he bowed low to the ground. If I’d had more wherewithal, I’d have known right away that something was amiss. But I did not. I was barely twenty, new to Shangai, transfixed by his movement, sinuous as a tiger. When we sat for dinner, I sneaked glances at his angled face through the white dumpling’s steam as he gouged it with a chopstick and muddied it with soy. He felt immediately familiar to me; back then, I didn’t realize that what I recognized in him was the pepper, so like my own at the time—all pepper, no flower. I remain in country to this day to protect my sons from the pepper they receive at Mao’s hand. But let me back up.
My name is Hua Jiao, flower pepper. These days, though on the outside I look like every other old woman in China, on my inside I am more aligned with my American name, Gracie, given me by my adoptive parents who brought me as a baby to the United States, specifically, to the deep South where the same white church is found on every corner, and Thankful Baptist is practically a franchise. I ought to be thankful, they often reminded me, the American parents who changed my name. To their thinking, it was doing me a favor to rescue me from China, to grant me American citizenship, an intact family, opportunities. The mom had longed for a child, unable to conceive her own, so she hurled herself into my rescue with frenetic intensity. Oh, how I resisted! To my mind, America was like the new mom’s smile—painted on, pasted on, red like fake love. How I longed to wipe that smile from her face! I used to imagine the red mouth gaping wide, stretching over the top of her head, the smile itself swallowing her whole.

“How can you call China home?” the mom complained when I did not list her in a family tree project my sophomore year of high school, instead detailing various branches of the Chinese lineage I’d spent the previous summer researching. “You lived there for one year when you were a tiny baby. One year! You are fifteen years old, Gracie, you can’t possibly remember.” That’s where she was wrong. I did remember, played it out in my mind like the old-fashioned film reels Mr. Lesh showed us in third period history. I suppose it was my flair for drama that dredged up one particular memory as a series of grainy celluloid squares, but I knew it was real: the winding black staircase, stretching round and round, reaching to what felt like the heavens; up, up, up, the sensation of my baby face, my tummy, buoyed with excitement to see my Chinese mother. I squirmed in the foreign arms of the American mom, struggled against them, beat them with frantic fists, and I felt the moment she gave up, hold loosened, tension released. I clawed toward the wooden door with its green, peeling paint, thrust my small body at the familiar face peering from behind a taught chain as I sputtered in Mandarin—the language of comfort, of rightness, of home.

I clutched my Chinese family tree drawing and, with the particular angst only a teenager can muster, narrowed my dark eyes at the American mom, my Asian eyes that would never be big and wide like her blue ones. “It helps to know what’s not home, as a basis for comparison.” I flung the words at her like darts. The counselor had a fancy label she put on me—Reactive Attachment Disorder; all I knew was I felt lonely and displaced, that I craved to fit in. Against all reason, I attributed every distress to the event that occurred when I was thirteen months old, when the adoptive mom took me from my true mother. My weapon-words hit their target, and I knew it. I did feel a prickle of remorse when I glimpsed the pain welling in those Miss America eyes, but I turned away—from her, from compassion—flung long black hair over my shoulder, the hair I brushed five hundred strokes a day, and rinsed with rice water the way it was described in the books I borrowed from the library on my American library card, books like Traditional Chinese Beauty Secrets and Timeless Herbs for Timeless Beauty. I knew it ground the mom’s nerves like pearl powder when she’d enter the kitchen laden with shopping bags and find me digging chopsticks in a rice bowl, poring over a volume on folding origami or Chinese writing.

“Can’t you just try?” was her constant refrain. Try—such a loaded word. Try what? To be her real daughter? Try encompassed conformity, fitting in, blending like American cheese, processed until it was formless and runny, without taste or texture.

“The kids at school probably think she doesn’t even speak English,” said my brother Ryan one day as he stood at the kitchen counter making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He was also adopted, and figured he could identify with my issues, considered it his right, his requirement even, to tease me. But I knew even he did not understand, for his adoption was domestic, his skin white as flour.

“Ryan!” The mom hated it when he made comments like that.

He licked peanut butter from the knife. “What? If she’d talk, they wouldn’t think that.”

“Gracie Smith, you are an American citizen,” said the mom. “Why can’t you accept that?”

Once, I discovered a crumpled adoption brochure, Oriental Children in American Homes, stuffed in the back of a kitchen drawer. I smoothed it out on the breakfast table and read my own care instructions as if I were a new puppy. The pamphlet explained how my parents should help me understand and embrace my Asian heritage. I found the following listed under Examples:

Celebrate Chinese holidays

Incorporate traditional Chinese foods

Introduce other adopted Chinese children

Others afflicted with the yellow skin. Only from library books did I learn my coloring was referred to in that way—yellow, like a water-stained book page, or vinegar, or urine. My parents didn’t refer to it at all. They acted as if I were a regular old part of the family along with Ryan, who was in my opinion the most truth-telling of all when he called us The Kids My Parents Bought.

Even as I neared the end of high school, the American mom still sat on the edge of my bed at night, tucked in the covers, kissed my forehead, as if holding onto this ritual kindness like an incantation would somehow break through my resistance. I remember how she’d smile at me hopefully, like a balloon filled with too much air, ready to pop. I stared, brushed away her hand as it tucked the hair behind my ear, rolled my face toward the wall. She must’ve worked hard to keep her expression serene, judging by the weeping I heard through the air vents after she’d turn off my light and go upstairs to my dad. I heard my name in between sobs. It made me feel better if she felt as miserable as I did, if her stomach, like mine, churned and roiled and never settled. I felt no empathy for her as I went to sleep listening to her cry.

It must have been pure exasperation that made the American parents agree to the foreign exchange plan I concocted my junior year at Georgia State. I thought of the old adoption brochure as I spread out study abroad pamphlets on the breakfast table during a weekend home from school. The dad rifled through the literature with characteristic impartiality; he’d always attempted to straddle the divide between the mom and me. “Shanghai? Don’t you want to go somewhere more, I don’t know, cultural? Shanghai is quite westernized, honey, you’re always talking about exploring your heritage.” He popped open a Diet Coke, and scratched his head.

The mom folded a paper napkin and placed it beneath his soda can. By the time I was in college, her eyes had taken on a permanent narrowness ironically like my own. She seemed to have given up, perhaps considering her opportunity to win relationship with me lost once I moved out of the house. She looked directly at me as if in challenge, and said to my dad, “She’s considering Shanghai only.” I did not look away, failing to realize that the very directness of my gaze proved just how American I really was. “She wants to find her mother,” said the mom, her voice acrid with resentment. With mixed satisfaction and regret, I realized that, in her eyes, I had indeed reverted to Hua Jiao.

I whipped my hair so it sheeted down my back, and announced, “Actually, I plan to live with my mother.” They both gaped. Such simple people, I thought. What possessed them to travel all the way to Shanghai to pluck me out in the first place? I was sure they’d only considered the international adoption since it was church-sponsored and -approved, the congregation raising money to shrink wrap, plasticize, evangelicalize me into their very own Mulan doll. “I have been in touch with my mother for several months now. She wants me to come.” I hoped the words would cut.

The lines between the mom’s eyebrows deepened into trenches as she frowned. “How—how did you find her?”

“Not so hard when she was trying to find me, too,” I said, my defiance stinking like rotten meat.

She said nothing. She was so quiet, so still.

The dad had many logistical questions, playing peacemaker, ignoring the relational carnage all around him. “I’m sure that’s a fine arrangement, explore your roots, long as you don’t let the school work slip.” He bent back over a brochure. “Fudan University? Is it accredited? If I’m paying for classes, they’d better be worth something in America.”

I think, at that point, she realized—the American mom who knew me better than I was willing to admit. Believe it or not, the intention wasn’t formed in me, not yet. When I departed the United States, I was packed for two quarters, return flight booked for just before summer vacation.

When I arrived in Shanghai, my Chinese mother did not pick me up at the airport. Instead, she sent her driver who stood in the line with a placard marked Hua Jiao. I was not surprised my mother had a driver; I’d already learned from her Evita-like account of the past two decades not to expect the old front door with the peeling, green paint. Her current husband was an investment banker who seemingly provided all she could want. I soon learned the two things he could not provide: 1.) a son, and 2.) social prominence attainable only through blood relation. My Chinese mother was determined to acquire both.

“Xie xie,” I murmured to the driver outside the airport—thank you—as he hoisted my bags into the trunk of the black car. He smiled, nodded, but remained silent as he opened the door, ushered me into the back seat. As we traveled along the highway into the city, the scene looked like something from an apocalyptic movie, smog close around us, blocking the sun. Clumps of buildings grew denser, until we were passing one city center after another, like twenty Atlantas all crammed into one—futuristic in shining glass and steel. I clutched the seat with both hands as horns blared and drivers zoomed around us as if in amusement park bumper cars. Even with the windows up, I was exposed to the rotten egg stench of burning coal and diesel, mixed with the rancid smell of sewage which collected on the street where men peed out in the open.

When I was delivered from the jarring sounds and smells of the street to my mother’s door inside a thick-walled compound, I floated on waves of jet-lag. I think they provided a buffer to the strangeness of her welcome—the way she swooped in, pulled off my boots, exchanged them for house slippers as the driver deposited my bags in the marble foyer. She sat me at the tall kitchen counter, and brewed green tea that resembled a mug full of grass clippings. She was all business. That’s what I could not process, this detached air about her. Had I been willing to see it, I’d have realized from the first that she lacked true comfort, true nurture. Certainly, she cared for my physical needs, but her underlying agenda was never really hidden. For my part, I was fighting the tide of my entire life up to that point, what I stubbornly perceived as the lack of true mother-love, and I was determined to realize my dream of belonging in Shanghai. That night, I was pleased when my mother fed me hot wonton soup along with the tea, ushered me to a pillowy, down-covered bed in my own suite with a private bath. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I woke to car horns and smog-diffused sunlight, that I realized what had been lacking: My mother had received me perfunctorily, like a visitor to a bed-and-breakfast, instead of like the daughter she hadn’t seen in nineteen years. Despite the spell cast by my determination, I realized there ought to have been at least some ceremony to our reunion.

I brought my inquiries to breakfast. My mother was busy in the kitchen, having breakfasted already on a meal prepared by the ayi who arrived daily to look after the housework. Ayi had set a place for me at the counter with chopsticks and white china. She worked quietly at the sink while my mother chattered to me in Mandarin; having discovered I’d studied the language, she’d decreed full immersion. I sat on the stool before the sparkling white place setting, still bleary from the time change. I asked bluntly in English, “Why did you give me up?”

She paused only momentarily, holding in the air a thin, brown string with which she was tying a potted orchid to a stick of bamboo. I stared at the cord and thought how incomprehensible it was that our two bodies had once been bound together. “Of course you know why. Only one child, no waste it on girl.” She made this remark with no hint of apology, and returned her attention to binding the orchid. When I remained silent, she looked up at me again. She smiled shrewdly, her teeth evidencing a lack of dental care which belied the image she projected with her tailored clothing and her jewels. “I like we try again.”

And I—I took the crumb she offered, and called it a feast.

Classes soon began at Fudan University where I relished in the anonymity of physically blending in with other students on the quad. I made a few friends, young women who took pains to avoid any personal topic over bowls of noodles in the cafeteria, and who covered their mouths when they smiled. In comparison, I felt myself brash, loud, aggressive. At home, my Chinese mother instituted what she considered a subtle program of filing away my American ways as if shaving an unsightly callous, scheduling every bit of my free time not spent sleeping or studying. Her curriculum was quite as intentional as the university’s: teaching me the proper way to serve tea; making treks to the history museum; going over nuances of social decorum; visiting the hairdresser, the spa, even the dermatologist who erased traces of sun exposure from my face. She stocked my bathroom with date oil for shiny hair, and skin cream with crushed pearl for whiteness. All my life I’d sought these things by myself; to suddenly have my own mother taking care of me felt heavenly.

“Your name,” she said, telling me what I’d longed to know. “Hua Jiao. You are numbing spice. Use Chinese manners as flower, before pepper.” She rubbed cream into my feet, bent forward, clucked at their large size.

The root of her care for me was not, of course, love, but something far more selfish. You see, she knew Mao. For good reason, she chose him as her entrée into the prominent Sung family, rather than his staid elder brother who held strictly to custom, and married early to a girl of good breeding. My mother knew of Mao’s travels—philandering in foreign countries, despising the requirements of social position set out by his parents. She guessed correctly that my American upbringing would not put off this young man, but rather intrigue him. As for me, if I were supposed to act out the meaning of my name, it also acted upon me: after several months of preparation, when it was time to meet Mao, my palate was sufficiently numb.

The night I met Mao was also the first time I met my mother’s husband. She’d planned the dinner months prior to coincide with her husband’s birthday, a time she knew he’d return to Shanghai from overseas. She needed him to effect a gray presence in the host’s place at table—the illusion of a traditional, patriarchal household of the type which would prove impossible if he really lived daily with my mother. I stood at the top of the stairs waiting for the Sung family’s arrival. Even now, I recall how I smoothed the silk of my body-hugging qípáo, the traditional Chinese banquet dress; it was red, for luck. I listened for my cue. My mother’d instructed me to wait upstairs while she welcomed our guests, and the ayi took their wraps. In the lull after the initial greetings, I began my slow descent, step by careful step, as we’d rehearsed—me thinking the rehearsal was to teach me Chinese customs, her knowing it was to advertise her merchandise.

My eyes met Mao’s right away, his so dark they were nearly black. I forgot to feign demure as I held his gaze descending the full curve of the staircase. When I reached the bottom step, he bowed before I had the chance, long hair falling across his face. He reached for my hand,—now soft from the skin treatments—turned it over, kissed the palm. When I looked toward his parents, their faces had reddened in embarrassment at their son’s breach of etiquette. I felt my cheeks flame accordingly beneath the pearl powder.

Throughout all eight courses of the meal—stir-fried prawns, shark fins soup, roasted suckling pig, sea coconut with jelly—Mao continued to run roughshod over the norms of decorum my mother had so carefully taught me. He seemed to do it with intention, cavalier in flaunting his boorishness. Although he had been directed to the seat across from mine, he chose to sit right beside me, whispering in my ear that the other side of the table was much too far away. If conversation were an art, that night Mao was like a child scrawling black crayon across a beautiful canvas, further shaming his parents. By the time the dumplings were served, his remarks were zinging toward his family with particular cruelty as if he wanted for them shi mianzi, to lose face.

“My father used to be profitable in exports.” Mao said as he bit into the suckling pig. “Until he put me in charge of client relations.”

The elder Sung did not speak, but his eyes flared warning.

Mao laughed humorlessly. “We all know that business has gone to hell.”

By the time the ayi brought in the tray of rice liquor, Mao was resting his hand on my bare thigh, which had been revealed by the long slit on the side of my qípáo. I was shocked at his brazenness and, at the same time, thrilled by the attention being paid me by this handsome young man from a good Chinese family. I chose to interpret his churlishness as verve.

Without ceremony, Mao suddenly shoved back his chair and extended his hand to me. “Shall we?” he asked in his barely accented English. My eyes flew to my mother’s. She gave a barely discernible nod, though her husband frowned. Mao’s parents looked stricken, but remained silent, and stared at their plates.

I smiled up at this man who both frightened and compelled me. I took his hand. He stalked toward the French doors, led me onto the balcony. I wanted him to want me, but by that point even I was feeling some alarm. Once outside, I could see past the thick wall of the compound to the lighted shops on the street side where, even at that late hour, vendors sold whole fish and yellow bags of roasted chestnuts. The stench of garbage was strong in the night air.

“Hua Jiao,” Mao said. He ran his hand through my hair.

I cast down my eyes, tried to back up, create proper distance between his body and mine. I felt the silk, tight against my hips.

Mao gripped the back of my neck. He pushed me against the balcony rail in a gesture that was on the knife-edge of hostile. I tensed, raised my hands, pushed against his chest.

But then he said, “You are my flower.” He kissed me, and I kissed him back.

My mother clapped her hands in glee when I announced my engagement to Mao. The rondo to her finely tuned symphony proceeded allegro, solidifying her place at the top tier of Shanghainese society and providing her, finally, with a son.

I wrote to my parents back in the States that I would be taking a break from classes, as I had decided to get married. I half-expected, perhaps even hoped, they’d fly to China in protest, and drag me back home with them; as I have said, I think the mom had guessed, even before I left home, that it would come to this. But I received from my parents only lukewarm congratulations, along with thanks for my future in-laws’ offer of plane tickets to attend the wedding celebration. Within months, preparations had been made. My marriage to Sung Mao was imminent.

I met my parents at the airport. Though my black hair blended in with the crowd of Chinese at the exit from customs, the mom spotted me immediately. She dropped the handle of her large rolling suitcase and ran through the receiving line to embrace me. “Gracie.” I surprised myself by leaning into the softness of the name. Then she held me at arms’ length. She frowned. “What happened to your cheek?”

My hand flew to cover a bruise which had purpled beneath my makeup. Neither my Chinese mother nor my future mother-in-law had mentioned it, so I’d naively believed it to be concealed. My eyes darted to my dad who’d picked up the dropped bag, to my brother Ryan who trailed behind him, then back to the mom. My mom. Her blue eyes widened as she cupped my cheeks ever so gently, and her right thumb softly covered the mark. “Gracie.”

Britt Tisdale has written for publications including Leadership, Group, Ignite Your Faith, Rock & Sling, Maggie Mae, and a forthcoming southern writers anthology. She graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a MFA (Fiction) in August 2012, and continues her work as a mental health counselor/creativity consultant in downtown Orlando, Fla. Britt has written a first novel, Arden Alive, and begun work on a second. You can find her at www.alivestudios.net.

As the train slowly moves south through France from its mountainous centre to its arid plains the colours of the vegetation subtly shift. We pass gardens with neat rows of tomatoes and haricots verts, tables with oilcloths and plastic chairs invitingly waiting under shady trees. Lavender bushes which were still in tight pale green bud in the mountains are in full purple bloom as we approach Nimes. Roses are full, open. The sky is deep blue.

I am met at the station by Nancy Gerbault who has organized a literary event which I am to attend for the weekend en route back to London, lured out of my writing retreat by the promise of spending time in the company of Michael Ondaatje, Andrew Motion and others, with the fantasy luxury of a bed in a chateau with breakfast on a pale stone terrace, with my only duties a screening or two and a session answering questions about screenwriting.

What I did not know about was the garden.

The Alchemists Garden

Next to the hotel (not a chateau, in fact, but a Ferme or farm) is a garden built relatively recently, based on alchemical principles. The next morning, in a soft warm breeze, the sun already slanting, hot, onto the immaculate lawns, I enter the garden through its labyrinth and become absorbed and entranced by what I find there. Lavender beds surrounding olive trees, enclosed by willow trees planted in criss-cross lattice form; herbs, vines, flowers; each bush, plant or tree with an adjacent discreet notice describing its properties, many of them traditionally seen as protective against the evil eye, bad influence, or sickness.

After this gentle tour through the powers of plants, comes the alchemical voyage through three inner gardens. First the alchemy garden, the ground covered in slate, everything laid out in straight lines, the borders metallic, the presence of still water, the mood somber. The alchemy garden has paths covered with white gravel, inset with circles of pale stone, a central stone pond surrounded by beds of white roses. A circular entrance through a hedge leads to the alchemy garden with rust-coloured gravel paths, beds of red roses and orange flowers, a central fountain in a six pointed star.

You can leave the black garden by using your mind, says a notice, but to transit the white garden, governed by the moon, you must open your heart. The journey through the red garden, governed by the sun, leads you to a state of transformation. You leave it ready to begin your life again.

I walk through the gardens three times during the weekend. In between I listen to readings (Michael on the craft of writing, Alan Lightman reading from his book Einstein’s Dreams and talking about his dual life as a writer and astrophysicist, Andrew Motion reading his poems, movingly) gaze at the golden light falling on bleached grasses, relax in the heat, talk, eat.

The screening of YES, in the Papal Palace in Avignon, leads to a long Q and A in which, in response to a question and to my observations of the preoccupations of some of the paying participants, I address the question of doubt, self-doubt in particular, as an important part of the writers’ process. My Self-esteem being an overvalued attribute in my view (you feel ashamed if you don’t have enough of it, adding to the sense of lack) I put forward a case for the celebration of both self-doubt and self-criticism. I have noticed that many students feel bad and anxious about the fact that they don’t feel happy with what they have achieved. They assume that those bearers of more conspicuous success must feel good about themselves.

I hope it is reassuring and energising to hear that feelings of confidence are a bonus and not a necessity in writing a screenplay (or perhaps anything else). The point, really, is to get on with it whatever you feel; to learn to coexist with emotional discomfort or anxiety, not to think there’s something wrong with you because it feels hard or you make mistakes.

(My repeated contacts with people struggling with these and other obstacles on the road of screenwriting and directing, some of them students, some practitioners, and the pleasure I get from being able to be of some assistances perhaps simply by saying out loud the things |I wish someone would say to me when I am struggling and it has led me to decide to offer an open workshop or two some time later this year.

Laughing

As we emerge from the Papal Palace to a soft pink early evening light, Michael Ondaatje suggests a ride on a carousel. Rebecca Swift and Rebecca Abrams, Michael and I sit on our painted wooden horses, laughing, laughing, and singing, as we slowly turn and turn on our horses as they rise and fall. Later, around midnight, after a feast, driving back into Egaylieres, Michael and I are consumed with the need to find a house we had each stayed in (at different times) some years back. Laughing, again, we stumble about in the dark. This is it. No, here! A light on in the house, a figure moving behind the shutters. Michael shouting up a name into the darkness.

The next morning I visit the alchemist garden one last time and take some photographs with my mobile phone. For the last month I have been gardening in southern central France: a view of mountains in the distance, but my eyes mostly scanning what is close. I have had my hands in the earth, day after day, calloused from digging, torn and bleeding from brambles, thistles and nettles.

I have planted three varieties of potato, two of carrot, four of French bean; tomatoes, leeks, beetroot (red and golden), three types of basil plus thyme, rosemary, mint, dill, tarragon, borage and coriander. The strawberries, when I left, were red and heavy; the roses were starting to bloom. A year ago it was a wilderness, full of choking weeds. Now it looks empty, too clean, but cared for.

Tomorrow, in London, I will be in a meeting about an opera; two scripts now sit in my suitcase, surrounded by uncertainty, budding but not yet blooming.

The next Abroad Writers’ Conference is scheduled for 21 to 28 November 2012 at Hever Castle. Authors teaching workshops are: Robert Olen Butler, Paul Harding, Edward Humes and Alex Shoumatoff along with three lecturing British historians: Sarah Gristwood, Eric Ives and Alison Weir.

A while ago, we wrote our Hever Castle writing conference would be a first for us on many levels – our first conference in a castle, our first conference in autumn, and the first time we have combined history with literature.

But there’s another first for us. We are opening our doors to the public.

In the past, we met dozens of fellow writing types at our workshop events. But this time we hope to meet hundreds, because we are also staging a series of lectures.

Dress up, come and have dinner with us and a glass of wine, hear our speakers, get your book signed, meet like-minded writers and have a chat with our experts.

They will be talking about the Tudors – particularly Anne Boleyn who lived at Hever Castle – the state of publishing today, literature and journalism for our time, along with the art of simply putting words together and crafting your stories. If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll already know some of our speakers.

Here are the details of our lecture evenings. Each dinner will raise money for a locally-based charity. Those organisations will receive 20% of our profits.

Alex’s investigation into the ivory trade went viral (www.freefoto.com)

In the digital world, journalists are faced with a choice. They can write in ever-shorter forms for websites so readers need not scroll down, they can come up with short-form text designed for phones and tablets, and they can send their work in 140 characters to Twitter.

Or they can try the Alex Shoumatoff method: Write nearly 10,000 words and see it go viral – which was the result of his investigation into the ivory trade across Africa.

Alex believes a writer needs at least 10,000 words to do justice to the complexities and ambiguities of their subject.

“There is still a market for the long fact piece, as I’ve learned from the huge response to my last two outings,” he says.

Alex’s 9,720-word piece on the ivory trade, Agony and Ivory, was published in Vanity Fair last year, and was later nominated for a National Magazine Award. His 11,050-word excavation of the history of a vanishing New York civilisation, Positively 44th Street, came out in the magazine this summer. And his latest non-fiction book, Legends of the American Desert, a cultural and natural history of the Southwest which met with rave reviews, spans 500 pages.

Write a ‘vomit draft’

The question is what is the secret of producing top-class writing at speed?

“The guy who could really write fast, knocking off a whiskey-fuelled single draft that was print-ready, was Christopher Hitchens,” Alex says. “I am not a fast writer. It is always a tortuous process.”

Alex starts with a “vomit draft”, a process that he describes as letting your mind run free. He achieves this by putting down any association and anything that comes to mind.

Later, he prunes and shapes his work. And even Alex, who has been described by one of his Vanity Fair editors as “one of the great prose stylists of this or any century”, can struggle to find the right word. Sometimes, at that stage in the process, the right word can come to mind while he walks or sleeps, Alex says.

“But this said, when I am in the zone, on a roll, I do write fast,” Alex says. “The best writing is the most straightforward. Often, as I am explaining something to somebody, it comes out the most naturally and clearly – more so than when I am straining for how to put it while sitting at my computer.”

‘Battle for our planet’

According to Alex, a good writer is made by work, tremendous intellectual curiosity, and knowing how to write by reading the great. A good piece of writing is “like good music,” he says. But when asked which writers today will become the great writers of the future, he answers: “Not many that I can think of.”

Alex has put himself on the frontline of the battle for our planet, with his writing about the fast-disappearing natural world. In 2001, he founded DispatchesfromTheVanishing World.com to raise awareness of the current unprecedented extinction rate of species and traditional cultures and man’s dramatic impact on his habitat.

His writing has already saved ancient redwoods in California and halted a project to install a hydroelectric transmission line in Manotiba. And his investigation into the ivory trade is changing opinions of the nouveau riche on ivory carvings and jewellery in China.

When Alex gives lectures and workshops, he covers his own huge range of writing styles. His list includes literary journalism, writing to effect positive change, writing for the world, investigative journalism, advocacy journalism, literary travelogue, “far-flung” reportage, nature writing, writing about the natural sciences, popular science writing, ethnography, poetry, song-writing, family history and memoir.

However, while his writing styles may be numerous, Alex’s aim is simple and in line with his overriding concern. “To make audiences aware of the seriousness of our ongoing deepening planetary emergency and the thousands of things each of us can do to be part of the solution and not the problem.”